How To Write Good
My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:
• Avoid alliteration. Always.
• Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
• Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
• Employ the vernacular.
• Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
• Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
• It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
• Contractions aren't necessary.
• Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
• One should never generalize.
• Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said:
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
• Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
• Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
• Profanity sucks.
• Be more or less specific.
• Understatement is always best.
• Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
• One-word sentences? Eliminate.
• Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
• The passive voice is to be avoided.
• Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
• Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
• Who needs rhetorical questions?
By Frank L. Visco,
a vice-president and senior copywriter
at USAdvertising.
a vice-president and senior copywriter
at USAdvertising.
